Beyond Exit: The Multilevel Dynamics of Partnership Termination

The way partnerships come to an end may play a critical role in sustaining collaborative achievements and safeguarding trust among partners and stakeholders. Yet the dynamics and challenges of partnership termination, especially planned endings, remain underexplored. This study contributes to expanding theoretical knowledge of partnership life cycle management and uses the ending as a reference point to generate insights relevant to the final and earlier partnering stages, as well as broader partnership management. Based on an in-depth case study of a global nonprofit-public partnership, it develops an inductive process framework depicting the interplay of termination pressures, collaborative end-stage tensions, and response strategies. While shaped by specific contextual factors, this framework helps to reframe the termination stage as a complex, multilevel process rather than a straightforward box-ticking exercise, with important implications for thinking within and across partnership life cycles.